“It is the single funniest thing that has ever happened.”
“I am thirty years old. I am a grown professional woman. I have held actual human hearts in my actual hands. And I cannot have a man’s name said to me over a Formica table without lighting up like a fire alarm.” I put my face in my hands. “Do you understand how mortifying that is. It’s involuntary. I have no defenses. Dottie has learned she can weaponize a nickname.”
“I think it’s adorable,” Stephy said, which did not help in any way.
We paused as Dottie dropped off our food with another barely stifled laugh. Then Steph leaned in over her milkshake, dropped her voice, eyes bright as a magpie’s. “Right. Mortification later. Details now. All of them. What’s he actually like?” And then, before I could find a clean answer, “He looks huge. Is he…” she did a thing with her eyebrows that ought to be illegal in a family establishment “…huge everywhere?”
“I am not answering that in a diner,” I said, and lost it — my milkshake very nearly went the wrong way — and she was already gone, both hands on her belly, wheezing, delighted with the sheer filth of herself, and I was dying, the pair of us cackling in the booth like a couple of teenagers until Dottie shot us a look from the pass.
When we’d wiped our eyes and got our breath back, the laugh ran out of me and left the true thing sitting there in its place, and for once I let it come.
“I really like him, Steph.” I turned my glass a slow quarter on the Formica. “I’m falling for him. Properly, and fast, and some part of me keeps saying it’s too soon, that I’ve known him five minutes,” I lifted one shoulder, helpless with it, “and then the rest of me doesn’t care. He’s exactly what he says he is, Steph. Nothing more, nothing less — no second version of him I have to go hunting for, nothing hiding under the good one. I don’t have to keep my guard up with him. He’s seen the whole of me, the parts I don’t let anybody see, and he didn’t so much as blink. Ihaven’t braced for a single thing in weeks. I’d forgotten what that even felt like.”
Steph’s eyes filled. She put her hand flat over mine on the glass and let the tears come without wiping them. “Soph,” she said, wobbling. “That is the only thing I have ever wanted for you.” Then she laughed wetly at herself and swiped under both eyes with a napkin. “Ignore me, I cry at ads now. And I am still telling that idiot brother of yours to mind his own business — that part’s mine, not yours.”
He camefor me late in the afternoon on the bike. He’d told me to pack nothing, which is its own kind of dare to a woman who plans everything.
I’d got as far as “Let me at least bring water, and a towel, and…” before he put one big hand flat over the top of my head like a lid. “I’ve got it. Get on the bike.” I got on the bike.
An hour and change out of town, the roads going smaller the further we went, a turnoff, then a track, and a place I’d have driven past my whole life and never known was there: water coming off a granite shelf into a green pool, loud enough to swallow the world, not another soul for a mile in any direction. He cut the engine and the roar of the falls rushed in to fill the space the bike left, and I got off and turned a slow circle in it like a tourist.
There was a blanket already down in the shade, and food — real food, planned food — and cold drinks sweating in a bag, and the shade itself chosen before I’d have thought to fret about the sun. I’m the one who packs for everyone. Nobody packs for me. My throat went tight over a folded blanket, whichwas mortifying, so I held up a napkin in evidence. “You packed napkins.”
“I’m a gentleman,” he said, and sat me down and fed me lunch under the trees.
I told him about the morning while we ate, reenacting the entire doctor’s appointment; Liam’s FaceTime and all. I did the voices. He sat with his back to a tree and watched my mouth the whole time, like there was nothing in the county worth more attention than me telling a story.
When I ran down he was quiet a moment. Then, low: “The way you talk about her.” His eyes hadn’t left my face. “The way you went, just now, telling it — your brother behind a curtain so he wouldn’t miss it, you in the room so she wouldn’t be on her own.” He reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “You’re so used to giving it, beautiful, you don’t notice when you’re standing right in the middle of it too.”
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Nobody had ever named me to my own face like it was a plain true fact of the world — in the shade, over a sandwich, no production made of it at all — and then gone back to his lunch as if he hadn’t.
We swam after. The water was cold enough to steal your breath the first second and perfect every one after, and I’d worn the bikini I’d bought in a fit of something I hadn’t examined in the shop and had never once had the nerve to put on — scraps of it, really, a deep red shade I’d never have chosen at twenty — and the way he looked at me when I came up out of the green in it made the nerve worth finding.
He could not keep his hands off me, and I found I had no wish for him to. We met under the fall itself, the water hammering white over the both of us, and he kissed me there with his hands framing my face and then not framing my face at all. I am a woman who has spent her whole life under low lamps and behind locked doors, and I stood in the loudest, brightest,most open place I have ever been and kissed him like I had nothing to hide and no one to manage.
He carried me back to the blanket and laid me down in the dappled shade and took the scraps of the bikini off me slowly, looking the whole while. He told me, low and unhurried and not fit to repeat, exactly what he thought of what he saw, and I went pink head to foot. Then he came down over me and made love to me in the open air with the falls roaring and the warm stone at my back through the blanket, slow and then not slow at all. I moved with him, my hands wide on his scarred back, the green canopy and the white sky wheeling past his shoulder, and when I came apart I was loud and unmanaged and entirely my own, and he went over right after, my name breaking rough out of him into my hair.
After, I lay sprawled half across him on a blanket in the middle of nowhere, the sun drying the water off the both of us, gloriously caught out in the open, and felt not one flicker of the old urge to lock a single door.
We rode home into the long gold end of the day, and I was a kind of happy I haven’t had much practice at — loose, sun-warm, emptied out of all my usual management, my arms around him and my cheek flat between his shoulder blades, the road unspooling under us. I’d quit running the worst case, for once. I was simply a woman on a motorcycle with her whole body trusting the back of a man.
We stopped for gas where the highway meets the county road — a tired little two-pump place, a flickering sign, a cooler humming by the door. And the second Caleb’s boots hit the concrete, something in him changed.
There was a man along the wall in the shade of the awning. Older, hard-used, a few days unshaven, a cigarette going to ash between his fingers that he wasn’t really smoking — and he waslooking at us. Not the glance everyone gives a bike that loud. Looking. The kind of attention you feel land on your skin.
I felt the change in Caleb before I understood it. The loose, unhurried set of him from an hour ago was gone; he came up quiet and squared and very still, the way I’d caught the edges of once or twice in the dark when a car door slammed too hard out on the road — the thing the Navy had left in him, switching on. He didn’t look at the man, and didn’t quite not look at him either.
“Come pay with me,” he said, easy as anything, his hand already at the small of my back. Not a question. I’d have been perfectly content to stand by the bike in the sun for ninety seconds; he steered me off it and in through the door ahead of him, his body between me and the lot the whole way, and I clocked it and filed it under sweet, the way he files everything about me, and thought no more of it than that.
Inside, fluorescent and cold, I leaned on the counter while he paid. “Do you know him?” I said, low. “That man out there. He’s giving us a real good look.”
“No.” He didn’t glance up from his card. “Don’t know him.”
He had us back out the door and onto the bike fast after that — faster than two pumps of gas called for, the man at the wall still watching, the engine catching with a bark — and we pulled out onto the county road and opened up, and the station went small in the mirror and took the man with it.
I leaned up to his ear. “Everything okay?”
For a second I didn’t think he’d answer. Then one hand came off the bars and pressed flat and warm over both of mine where they were locked at his middle, and held there, and then dropped to my thigh and rubbed once, slow, a thing I felt all the way up. “Everything’s fine, beautiful.” Over his shoulder, the endearment as soft in it as it had ever been. “Everything’s fine.”
